*
Look what you’ve got says the midwife. I don’t remember her name. I don’t think I ever knew her name. From the moment the doctor noticed that I really did need to push, the pain kept rising until there wasn’t a thought of riding it, wasn’t a thought of any baby because truly I was going to die, truly
all these people and light and me stranded high on a hard, bright bed, and I would get up and leave if only I could walk, and whoever keeps on telling me to push does not listen when I say this is going to kill me, and look, here is Helen telling me that she loves me and saying
nearly done, nearly done, here’s the baby’s head, nearly done, and someone puts my hand there and it is soft and hot and completely unlike any head I have ever felt
and I am spelling it out to them as clearly as I can, this really hurts, but maybe I have forgotten to speak, I am trying to explain this reasonably, I am dying but instead
there is a crowd of faces at the end of my bed looking up at me, staring up at where some natural disaster is surely taking place, where earthquakes are tearing the land apart, where skyscrapers are toppling and lightning is repeatedly striking, where tidal waves are crashing in over and again and I am drowning and these voices are telling me to
push
and not to scream
and here is Helen hanging on to my head and for god’s sakes smiling and saying nearly done, look and I look down several miles to where the pain is
and there is the baby’s head all black and red like an old wound, a new accident, and the baby is wearing me like a too-tight pullover over its head
and the midwife is running her finger round and round inside my skin, stretching it over the baby’s head
and there is a crowd of people, the midwife I love and the midwife I hate and all of them still telling me to push, down, and I can’t because there is no forward any more and no future, no after and certainly no baby, just the pain and I keep on explaining I can’t do this but no one believes me
and when I say this hurts they say good and when I am sick they say good and I am clearly going to die and I hit whatever machine is on my right and I bite the tube they hand me and lash at whoever is holding my arms and I’m not going to push, I’m going to fight, and when they tell me to stop pushing, I push
and now I am burning, something different is happening, now I am the dead centre of the window that smashes, I am a tree where the axehead strikes, now the split second of a head-on crash, the moment the dam gives way
and something bursts out of me, a wave flooding over my thighs too quick and hot to be blood and something solid rips out of me and everyone is speaking and the room is loud and very bright and
there is a baby
there is a baby
and now I remember
and I am saying oh my god oh my god over and over
there is a baby
and the midwife is saying
look what you’ve got, and she says it again, look, look what you’ve got
oh my god
a baby
*
For weeks after the event, birth and you laid waste to me. I was all terror and bruises. Like flat land after the storm, there was nothing left standing, no way to take my bearings. I stood in the ruins and wept at the unwashed windows, the meals I couldn’t eat. The bed we didn’t sleep in any more.
Nothing about me was the same. Some moments I would see my old self walk past and wave, but it was always goodbye. I could not let myself regret a thing, but the grief was a universe I lived in alone.
Now I wear my own body like someone else’s clothes. I don’t recognise these feet. Somehow, my toenails have grown without me noticing, without me playing any part.
*
It’s seventeen years since I left home. Winter is now over. The lambs have moved to the field behind our house, the geese have eight goslings. When I step outside each morning, the air is crowded with birdsong and water. Mum is coming for tea.
I meet her at the bottom of our lane, by the gate that leads into the wood. She has her good shoes on and is careful to avoid the mud. She’s wearing a skirt and a careful layer of make-up, she has one large earring in her left ear. She’s brought us a box of After-Eights and three-quarters of a bottle of ginger wine. I’m carrying my baby on my hip.
It’s a light spring evening, mild enough for midges. We sit outside where the garden opens down to the canal and watch the barges. My mother and Helen discuss the colour of forsythias, and I bring us ginger wine in tiny cut-glass glasses which Helen and I have to share because we only have two.
Mum has discovered a carrier bag full of newspaper cuttings stretching back over the fifty years my siblings and I have been in existence. It’s been hanging around for years, but she says she’s never seen it before. And here are the pictures of me, smart in my clever white shirt and neat hair, the mysterious story of my long-distance balloon. My sister’s accident, my dead father doing yoga in his underpants. Cross-country results, the time I was raped, my prize-winning essay on the local tip. Weddings and court appearances and births. To Gerrie and Maureen, a daughter.
It’s seventeen years since I left home. I’ve had five partners and one nervous breakdown. Things get steadily better, much better. I’ve got a daughter. I pass her to my mother whilst Helen and I get tea. When I come back, my mother has her face in my daughter’s hair. The evening light is yellow and mellowing, a train passes on the other side of the valley. ‘She’s a very lucky little girl,’ she says, and I say, ‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
Authors Biogs
Suzanne Batty was born in Plymouth, twenty minutes after her twin sister, and upside down. She lives in Manchester where she runs creative writing workshops for people experiencing and recovering from mental distress. She is very committed to the creative act as an act of healing, not just for the individual but in a wider sense. Suzanne also teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is studying for an M.A. Her poetry collection, The Barking Thing, was published by Bloodaxe in 2007. She is the co-editor of poetry magazine Rain Dog which was created to get more women poets into print. When she’s not writing or teaching, she is usually indulging her dog or neglecting her allotment, or both.
Anne Caldwell was born in London in the baby boom of the sixties and decided to come to the world early. She grew up as a small-town girl in Cheshire and has worked in youth hostels, community arts, libraries, restaurants, and a cake decoration factory. After much travelling and city life, she now lives in a Pennine village with her son. Other passions in life include food, growing herbs and second-hand shops. Her first poetry collection Slug Language was published in 2008 by Happenstance. As far as she knows, she is the only writer in Yorkshire to win a chocolate shoe for her work. (http://annecaldwell.net)
Nell Farrell feels her birth weight is slightly less noteworthy than her birthplace, Eastwood, which she shares with D.H. Lawrence. She now lives in Sheffield where she earns her living in social work education and as a creative writing tutor. The rest of her time is divided out (in a not very neat pie chart) between writing, cooking, watching football, reading, chatting, running, lying in the bath with a gin and tonic and imagining she can still speak French as well as when she spent a year in the Auvergne. Her poems have appeared in many poetry journals and her short collection The Wrong Evangeline was published by Panshine Press in 2003. She was recently a runner-up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition and has been awarded Second Prize in the 2008 Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition.
Char March was born (after her mum had a series of miscarriages) with the aid of an experimental drug which unfortunately wrecked Char’s immune system, but this has been terribly character-building! She is an award-winning poet, playwright and short fiction writer. She grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in Central Scotland. Having Yorkshire parents, this was a wonderfully bracing childhood – given the level of anti-Englishness! She has worked in everything from a brussel-sprout factory to Opera North, and adores sea-
canoeing and mashed potato. Char now divides her time between her 82-year-old mum’s (in the NW Highlands) and her own home in the Yorkshire Pennines – she clearly has an affinity with rain.
Clare Shaw’s proudest claim to fame is that she was the second biggest baby born in Burnley. Described by Carol Ann Duffy as ‘probably the best, most electrifying, new young reader on the circuit’, Clare grew up in Burnley, spent ten years in Liverpool and now lives in West Yorkshire with her partner, her daughter and various geriatric cats. Her first poetry collection, Straight Ahead, was published by Bloodaxe in 2006. She is widely known for her work and publications around women’s mental health, and is co-director in a self-harm training partnership (www.harm-ed.co.uk).
River Wolton’s birth weight was a mere four and a half pounds but she soon filled out. Born within spitting distance of London’s Hyde Park Corner, she grew up in the capital, lived in Sheffield for twenty years and recently moved to north Derbyshire. She’s been a social worker, carpenter and therapist, and now teaches creative writing everywhere from primary schools to care homes for the elderly. Years ago she changed her first name, and often answers the question ‘Were your parents hippies?’ with ‘No, I was’ (though sadly too young for the Summer of Love). Her latest pamphlet is The Purpose of Your Visit (Smith/Doorstop 2008) and she is currently Derbyshire Poet Laureate. (www.riverwolton.co.uk)
Verso Page
First published by Route, PO Box 167, Pontefract, WF8 4WW
[email protected]
www.route-online.com
Editor: Anne Caldwell
Thanks to: Ian Daley and Isabel Galan at Route, Polly Thomas, Ann Atkinson, Gillie Bolton, Helen Drucquer, Clare Maguire, Fiona Outram, Betsy Warland, Barbara Skillen, Simon Midgeley, Jane Mathieson, Rose Ryan, Libby Tempest, Janet Puzylo, Anne Sherman, Punam Ramchurn, Catherine Browne and Avril Heffernan.
This book is based on real lives and events but is a work of creative non-fiction. Some names and details have been changed. The views expressed are those of the authors themselves.
Cover Design, Art Direction and Photography made in The Designers Republic
All rights reserved
No reproduction of this text without written permission
For more on this book, including performance videos and audio readings, and for Route’s full programme of books, please visit www.route-online.com
Some Girls' Mothers Page 8